Occasional reader SM emailed last night to report on the new novel by Robert Littell, The Stalin Epigram:It is a fictional account of the time of the Russian purges in the 1930s, and it focuses on what happened to Osip Emilievich Mandelstam. Littell says: "The publication of his first book of poetry in 1913, entitled Stone, established him in the eyes of many as "the" great Russian poet of the twentieth century, a view that Stalin clearly shared." Of course, Mandelstam dies in a prison camp. He is on a train, taking him to Siberia. Also in the cattle car with Mandelstam is a professor who organizes their car and thus gets its passengers to the first major stop without any loss of life. Then on p. 265:For those not familiar with the history of this quip, you can start here.
"I overheard a lady mention what the professor was a professor of. It turned out to be something called linguistics. The lady said that he was famous for figuring out the difference between languages and dialects -- languages were spoken by people with armies, dialects by people without."
The image is of Mandelstam.
5 comments:
Wikipedia has an excellent article on the vitz. In short, Max Weinreich first published it (in Yiddish) in 1945, but he says he heard it the year before from a high-school teacher who remains unidentified. Needless to say, Weinreich was not on a train to Siberia in 1938 -- he was in fact in Vilnius, Lithuania, not then part of the Soviet Union.
Thanks -- the wikipedia article is good. Of course the great Max Weinreich did not get famous for the quip either!
You ought to offer a poll to see which famous linguist is believed to have first said the quote (no one is allowed to think about this for more than 1 minute). My vote has always been for Einar Haugen.
I'm happy to do that, Anon, but who are the best candidates? Weinreich and Haugen are good, and Meillet is in there, I think. Fishman is out by the earliest known attestation.
I bet some obvious non-contenders could garner some votes, e.g., Bloomfield, Sapir, Jakobson, Joos, ... pick a bunch and add in some lesser known (to American generativists) Europeans and you'd have a field. Even throw in ones that are probably from the wrong century: Schliecher, Bleek, J Grimm, .... You name 'em, we vote 'em.
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